Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer who wrote books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952)

 * Old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said I would find out where my palm-wine tapster who had died was.
 * Page 9


 * ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon.
 * Page 17


 * The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living.
 * Page 84


 * Alo is a lie!
 * Page 95


 * Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?
 * Page 98


 * The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration.
 * page 99


 * Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard.
 * page 100


 * I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.
 * Chapter 1, page 191


 * When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine.
 * Chapter 1, page 193


 * This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man.
 * Chapter 1, page 194


 * By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground.
 * Chapter 5, page 205


 * So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife.
 * Chapter 11, page 213